Hearing can make “invisible” objects appear

Hearing an object's name makes spotting it through visual noise easier.

Words that make objects appear from thin air are generally the stuff of the magical worlds of Harry Potter or Hobbits. But a new experiment has shown that words can make objects easier to recognize, as our sense of vision can be altered by other sensory inputs.

"People assume that vision is the most impervious of the senses, impenetrable to outside influences," said Gary Lupyan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the research. But evidence is growing that shows external information can change what one sees.

Lupyan wanted to know how much of what we see is affected by factors outside of vision. "For example, when you see lights flashing in a club, they appear to be playing in time with the music. Actually, in most cases, the lights aren't doing that. The visual system adjusts what you see. In terms of timing, people have more accurate hearing, and thus what one sees gets altered accordingly," Lupyan said.

In the study published in PNAS, Lupyan used equipment that showed different things to each of a participant’s eyes. One eye was shown an image (a kangaroo, for example) and the other a series of continuous flashes. The flashes suppress the visual perception of whatever object was being presented to the other eye.

Then Lupyan asked the participants whether they saw the image. He found that participants were far more likely to recognize what they were seeing if they heard a valid verbal label, such as the word "kangaroo," before the task. And they were less likely to see the image if the word they heard was irrelevant.

This is not because the word prompted the participant to recover something they had seen subconsciously, Lupyan explained. "The flashing technique disrupts vision at a very low-level. This means that there is no signature of any subconscious cognitive processing of the image. So the word (the label) actually gets into the visual system itself."

These findings suggest that language can give a boost to perception—relevant words changed what participants saw. This idea has widespread ramifications. It implies an intensely interactive network between "lower level" senses and "higher level" cognitive functions, a network that works both ways.

Dan Mirman of the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute studies speech and color perception. He explained that "there are two ways of thinking about perception and cognition. One takes the view that there are progressive levels of processing information that go from the more simple senses to complicated cognition. However, the other option is to see these levels as all working together."

"My work in speech and color perception argues for this interactive view, as does this research," Mirman added. "Visual processing and language are normally studied completely separately. This study has shown that these things interact very directly."

This research thus allows us to question whether language literally changes what we see, that is, naming an object evidently affects visual representations in some way. "What does having language mean in this context?" Lupyan questioned. "It evidently has far more than a communicative function."

"Humans are the only animals who have an evolved language. We can teach this to other animals to some degree. Parrots and dogs, for example, can learn to associate objects with a label. But not in the wild."

"It seems these labels may allow an animal to perceive in a completely different way—in categories. Language in some way abstracts us away from particulars, from detail."

This brings up another possibility. If these labels are not just a shorthand, but actually affect how we perceive, as Lupyan's experiments suggest, then do people who speak different languages see and remember things differently? Other research suggests they do. Russian speakers, for example, have two different words for the color blue. These labels change how Russian speakers perceive and understand color.

"You might," Lupyan concluded, "compare the difficulty in translating poetry. Some subtle emotion or meaning is always lost. What if we see substantially differently in different languages, in a way that is similarly lost in translation?"

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These findings suggest that language can give a boost to perception—relevant words changed what participants saw. This idea has widespread ramifications. It implies an intensely interactive network between "lower level" senses and "higher level" cognitive functions, a network that works both ways.

I wonder if this is how language first came about. Think about it for a second, If naming something helps us recognize something sooner than it would have an evolutionary benefit for us to develop words or at least sounds to help us avoid that mean old leopard.

I seem to remember watching animal planet a while back when they had a show on a monkey species in the serengeti that made different noises to their comrades depending if there was a snake, large kitty cat, or non-threatening animal coming into camp.

I seem to remember watching animal planet a while back when they had a show on a monkey species in the serengeti that made different noises to their comrades depending if there was a snake, large kitty cat, or non-threatening animal coming into camp.

I saw something similar where a monkey would lie by making the call associated with a predator when there was no predator so that he would be able to eat a bit of food he'd stashed without anyone seeing where he'd stashed it.

"Humans are the only animals who have an evolved language. We can teach this to other animals to some degree. Parrots and dogs, for example, can learn to associate objects with a label. But not in the wild."

There are non-human animals with communications systems that pass the sniff test as "languages." The sounds are arbitrary (not imitative of the thing referenced) and learned by the young of the species.

Not exactly Shakespeare, but still much more sophisticated than implied here.

Edit: See the two posts above. I remember seeing something on those monkeys as well, but can't remember the species. Was funny to see the youngins mis-use a call and send the whole troop scurrying.

I was already familiar with this effect, or something similar - I didn't know it was new science.

When we take our kids to the water park, we always have them wear the same brightly-colored t-shirts. Standing at a high point in the park, there might be 150 kids in view; casually taking in the whole scene without looking at anything in particular, I'll say the word "orange" out loud, and everything orange sort of "lights up", perceptually speaking. Out of all the orange things that pop out of the whole sort of general mish-mash, only a few are t-shirts, and of those, only two are on my kids.

I like the strobe light example. I've also been amused more than once to note that when watching television newscasters with a different audio source, either musical or spoken, the lip sync appears to work surprisingly well most of the time.

In visual astronomy often if you have seen an object in a larger scope, it will make it easier to see the details in smaller aperture scope. You kind of know what to look for. This seems kind of similar.

There is no mention of pareidolia in this article by the scientists performing this experiment or the author.

How can the scientists be sure that hearing specific words did not trigger pareidolia in the test subjects which in turn lead them to "see" the target?

With the object actually being present in the image, it would not take much effort for the test subjects to find the correct pattern in the image.

Pareidolia doesn't require priming, so it's a different phenomenon. What is implied by your last sentence does not seem like a case of pareidolia to me, it's just priming. Which is what they are claiming here.

Proof of pareidolia here, I think, would be showing that their description of what they see is significantly different than the actual image presented. In other words, they did see an image, but it wasn't the actual image.

I might have the same critique as Kilroy420, but I'll word it differently anyway.

It seems as though he misinterprets "Well, I was supposed to see a kangaroo because they said kangaroo. I think I saw a kangaroo." I don't know how you'd have a control group to separate this kind of result, but I have a hard time believing their theory until they do.

@jdale - your idea for false priming is exactly what they need to do before I believe their results.

I might have the same critique as Kilroy420, but I'll word it differently anyway.

It seems as though he misinterprets "Well, I was supposed to see a kangaroo because they said kangaroo. I think I saw a kangaroo." I don't know how you'd have a control group to separate this kind of result, but I have a hard time believing their theory until they do.

@jdale - your idea for false priming is exactly what they need to do before I believe their results.

I suppose they could compare their kangaroo results with their bear results and see if they get a similar number of primed errors vs primed positives... i suppose they already did this.

I might have the same critique as Kilroy420, but I'll word it differently anyway.

It seems as though he misinterprets "Well, I was supposed to see a kangaroo because they said kangaroo. I think I saw a kangaroo." I don't know how you'd have a control group to separate this kind of result, but I have a hard time believing their theory until they do.

I'm not familiar with pareidolia, but would this do the trick? Assume there's a picture of a kangaroo, and no pictures of a leopard.

When the author of this study says "Humans are the only animals who have an evolved language", did he actually mean "Humans are the only animals who [we can thoroughly prove and verify] have an evolved language"? Because I'm pretty sure there are examples of animal species out there with various forms of learned "language", be it the primitive form found in certain monkey species (as posted above) or the more articulated patterns found in whale and dolphin speech.

Just because we don't understand the stuff doesn't mean it's not there. If anything, it suggests that it's probably much more complex than we're expecting and as any linguist could tell you, trying to reverse-engineer a language without understanding any social cues or having any related languages (that are well-understood) to fall back on is pretty damn hard.

I might have the same critique as Kilroy420, but I'll word it differently anyway.

It seems as though he misinterprets "Well, I was supposed to see a kangaroo because they said kangaroo. I think I saw a kangaroo." I don't know how you'd have a control group to separate this kind of result, but I have a hard time believing their theory until they do.

@jdale - your idea for false priming is exactly what they need to do before I believe their results.

I suppose they could compare their kangaroo results with their bear results and see if they get a similar number of primed errors vs primed positives... i suppose they already did this.

What if we see substantially differently in different languages, in a way that is similarly lost in translation?

This already has an answer. People divide colors in the visible spectrum according to linguistic divisions in color. This leads to someone perceiving two distinct colors in one culture, but in another culture, the distinction is not culturally emphasized, and the colors look much less distinct.

I might have the same critique as Kilroy420, but I'll word it differently anyway.

It seems as though he misinterprets "Well, I was supposed to see a kangaroo because they said kangaroo. I think I saw a kangaroo." I don't know how you'd have a control group to separate this kind of result, but I have a hard time believing their theory until they do.

I'm not familiar with pareidolia, but would this do the trick? Assume there's a picture of a kangaroo, and no pictures of a leopard.

The authors are making some very strong statements here - that semantic reinforcement (a well-known phenomenon) can take effect much further upstream than was previously thought, and may operate at such basic levels as the LGN or even the retina itself.

It's certainly very interesting, but I'm not convinced that the CFS they used was capable of completely preventing trace signals reaching the visual cortex. One of the references they cite is Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005, which certainly shows impressive reduction in afterimages, but even when the suppression was strongest, afterimages were still produced - something was still getting through, even if quite weakly.

It's certainly interesting, and these results could be used to support funding for further studies with more intensive investigation of cortical activity. But I wouldn't buy into these conclusions just yet.

"People assume that vision is the most impervious of the senses, impenetrable to outside influences,"

Anyone who has seen any sort of optical illusion ought to know better. Emphasis on "ought to". We have an amazing capacity for taking our concious experience for granted.

My favourite illusion is the stopped clock illusion because it suggests that a significant portion of our concious experience is back-dated by a short but perceptible amount of time.

As to the "is my blue your blue" thing (philosophy accessible to children!) there have been some results on that, most significantly relating to the Himba people in Namibia. Their language has colour categorisation different from ours, and experimental evidence suggests that it affects their qualitative experience of colour.

What I love most about this stuff is that it experimentally proves the existence of seemingly ineffable phenomenon ("the blueness of blue") while at the same time applying science to better understand it.

What if we see substantially differently in different languages, in a way that is similarly lost in translation?

This already has an answer. People divide colors in the visible spectrum according to linguistic divisions in color. This leads to someone perceiving two distinct colors in one culture, but in another culture, the distinction is not culturally emphasized, and the colors look much less distinct.

I recently listened to the Color episode of Radiolab, which discusses this in detail. Fascinatingly, early writings (Iliad, Odyssey, and similar works from non-Greek culture) contain virtually no references to the color blue. The working theory is that other than sky and water, there is very little in nature that is blue, and they had no capacity to create things that were blue, ergo there was no practical use to having such a word to describe it.

If you find articles like this interesting, I highly recommend you read John Medina's book Brain Rules. Not only do you learn other non-intuitive (heh) things about how the brain works, but Medina is a great writer.

What if we see substantially differently in different languages, in a way that is similarly lost in translation?

This already has an answer. People divide colors in the visible spectrum according to linguistic divisions in color. This leads to someone perceiving two distinct colors in one culture, but in another culture, the distinction is not culturally emphasized, and the colors look much less distinct.

I recently listened to the Color episode of Radiolab, which discusses this in detail. Fascinatingly, early writings (Iliad, Odyssey, and similar works from non-Greek culture) contain virtually no references to the color blue. The working theory is that other than sky and water, there is very little in nature that is blue, and they had no capacity to create things that were blue, ergo there was no practical use to having such a word to describe it.

That working theory is hogwash. Plenty of stuff in nature is blue. We may never be able to figure out why Ancient Greek didn't have a word for blue (assuming, of course, that's even true), but that doesn't mean we should make up stupid explanations.

I'm skeptical of the take-away that this tells us anything about language. It's more likely language is just a convenient way to get the idea "kangaroo" foremost in the subject's consciousness. I'll bet it works just as well to use sounds (for animals with unique sounds) or smells (with food items in the pics, possibly). Play an elephant's trumpet and I'd expect you'll get the same result as for the word "elephant".

The ability to tune the visual system is a very useful ability; one that is unlikely to be uniquely linked to language. Even without language, it is possible for other creatures to have an idea of what they are looking for, thus allowing the visual system to be tuned to look for it. A baboon on the savannah that catches the scent of a leopard would be very interested in being able to pick the leopard out of the visual clutter, for example. Similarly for the leopard hunting the baboon.

What if we see substantially differently in different languages, in a way that is similarly lost in translation?

This already has an answer. People divide colors in the visible spectrum according to linguistic divisions in color. This leads to someone perceiving two distinct colors in one culture, but in another culture, the distinction is not culturally emphasized, and the colors look much less distinct.

I recently listened to the Color episode of Radiolab, which discusses this in detail. Fascinatingly, early writings (Iliad, Odyssey, and similar works from non-Greek culture) contain virtually no references to the color blue. The working theory is that other than sky and water, there is very little in nature that is blue, and they had no capacity to create things that were blue, ergo there was no practical use to having such a word to describe it.

I miss Radiolab, but I stopped listening to that show after the Yellow Rain ambush interview.

I'm skeptical of the take-away that this tells us anything about language. It's more likely language is just a convenient way to get the idea "kangaroo" foremost in the subject's consciousness. I'll bet it works just as well to use sounds (for animals with unique sounds) or smells (with food items in the pics, possibly). Play an elephant's trumpet and I'd expect you'll get the same result as for the word "elephant".

The ability to tune the visual system is a very useful ability; one that is unlikely to be uniquely linked to language. Even without language, it is possible for other creatures to have an idea of what they are looking for, thus allowing the visual system to be tuned to look for it. A baboon on the savannah that catches the scent of a leopard would be very interested in being able to pick the leopard out of the visual clutter, for example. Similarly for the leopard hunting the baboon.

In both humans and some animals, it's been shown that training on a particular visual stimuli of interest increases sensitivity to that stimulus, at the cost of sensitivity to different stimuli. Especially in experiments with different prey types. Developing a "search image." http://www.pigeon.psy.tufts.edu/avc/pbl ... ention.htm I think that's a good example of tuning the visual system, as you say, that is not related to language.

This is still pretty interesting because of the cognitive level it has to come in at, but it's certainly not the only example of tuning the visual system.

"Humans are the only animals who have an evolved language. We can teach this to other animals to some degree. Parrots and dogs, for example, can learn to associate objects with a label. But not in the wild."

There are non-human animals with communications systems that pass the sniff test as "languages." The sounds are arbitrary (not imitative of the thing referenced) and learned by the young of the species.

Not exactly Shakespeare, but still much more sophisticated than implied here.

Edit: See the two posts above. I remember seeing something on those monkeys as well, but can't remember the species. Was funny to see the youngins mis-use a call and send the whole troop scurrying.

I've read research that suggests prairie dogs have proper nouns at the very least, and likely much more.

From a recent article:

Quote:

"They're able to describe the colour of clothes the humans are wearing, they're able to describe the size and shape of humans, even, amazingly, whether a human once appeared with a gun," Slobodchikoff said.

That was with just a single google search. I've seen similar articles for at least 10 years. My feeling is that if we aren't finding animals with complex language, it's either because we aren't looking or we don't know what it is we're seeing and hearing, not because they don't exist.

I wonder if this is how language first came about. Think about it for a second, If naming something helps us recognize something sooner than it would have an evolutionary benefit for us to develop words or at least sounds to help us avoid that mean old leopard.

I seem to remember watching animal planet a while back when they had a show on a monkey species in the serengeti that made different noises to their comrades depending if there was a snake, large kitty cat, or non-threatening animal coming into camp.

What if we see substantially differently in different languages, in a way that is similarly lost in translation?

This already has an answer. People divide colors in the visible spectrum according to linguistic divisions in color. This leads to someone perceiving two distinct colors in one culture, but in another culture, the distinction is not culturally emphasized, and the colors look much less distinct.

I recently listened to the Color episode of Radiolab, which discusses this in detail. Fascinatingly, early writings (Iliad, Odyssey, and similar works from non-Greek culture) contain virtually no references to the color blue. The working theory is that other than sky and water, there is very little in nature that is blue, and they had no capacity to create things that were blue, ergo there was no practical use to having such a word to describe it.

That working theory is hogwash. Plenty of stuff in nature is blue. We may never be able to figure out why Ancient Greek didn't have a word for blue (assuming, of course, that's even true), but that doesn't mean we should make up stupid explanations.

For a pretty amazing book on language, I recommend Guy Deutcher's "The Unfolding of Language".

For a detailed look at the question as to why the ancient Greeks didn't use the word for blue when describing blue colours, Guy Deutcher's "Through the Language Glass" is the book. It contains and clarifies every example that's been used above, and it's a pity that the NPR people didn't explicitly reference the book in their program about colour and language. Stephen Fry calls the book "jaw-droppingly wonderful".

I would recommend both books (he's a fantastic writer) for anyone interested in psychology or linguistics.

Suffice to say that the realm of how much the language modules in the brain/mind influence the perceptive abilities of the brain/mind is research that is still in its infancy.

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